The castle of Torre in Pietra, also called the Falconieri castle, is a historic residence at Torre in Pietra, in the Roman Campagna, in the comune of Fiumicino. At first the village was a castrum surrounded by towers and city walls.
What to see
In 1254 the castle belonged to the Normanni family, who joined several neighbouring estates into a single property; it then probably passed by inheritance to the Anguillara, who in 1457 sold it for three thousand gold ducats to Massimo di Lello di Cecco dei Massimo, and then to the Peretti. In 1639 it was sold to the Falconieri princes: Ferdinando Fuga made the church and the staircase of the piano nobile and Pier Leone Ghezzi the interiors, mostly frescoes tied to the Jubilee year 1725, when Alessandro Falconieri called him to decorate the piano nobile with scenes celebrating Pope Benedict XIII's visit to the castle. At the end of the eighteenth century the castle was the centre of an estate of over three thousand hectares. In the second half of the nineteenth century the Falconieri died out and Torre in Pietra went through an age of decline; in 1926 it passed to Senator Luigi Albertini, who reclaimed the land and made it one of the most prestigious livestock farms in Italy, and in 1941 to his daughter Elena Albertini, married to Count Nicolò Carandini, whose heirs are still its owners.
The castle is surrounded by gardens with tall pines, from one of which you enter the courtyard, with a portico of columns with depressed arches. On the ground floor is the sala Peretti, of 220 square metres, with a large fireplace and a round-arched ceiling; a historic staircase leads to the upper floor, where Ghezzi's frescoes adorn a salone, the salette Falconieri, the stanza del bosco, the sala verde and the gallery: the last four rooms are frescoed with tree-lined panoramas. The chapel of Sant'Antonio Abate is Baroque, octagonal in plan with a single nave, with a portal topped by a triangular pediment and flanked by four pilasters; on the altar is a Madonna and Child, and weddings are held there.
Visiting
The castle is still lived in by the heirs of Luigi Albertini, who run a hospitality business of weddings, parties, conferences and guided visits; it often hosts film sets and belongs to the Associazione Dimore Storiche Italiane. The sources consulted give no hours or fees: check visits with the owners.
Our editors' tip
The cellars of the winery were made by digging under a tuff hill formed from the ashes of the Bracciano volcano and have served wine since the seventeenth century; in 1938, during their enlargement, numerous remains of prehistoric elephants, of the species Palaeoloxodon antiquus, were found there. Today the vines are grown organically on 52 hectares, out of about 150 for the estate.
